Evaluating Tier 1 Internet providers

Wed Aug 28 01:48:20 UTC 2013

You should also consider who exactly your customers (or you alone) want to reach.  Are you mostly looking to connect to eyeball networks?  Enterprise networks?  Government networks?   If you have some target networks you should do some due diligence to find out how well connected your various options are to the networks that mean the most to you.

If possible, I would also recommend talking to other people that are in your data centers, if that's possible.  You might find out about hidden vendor-specific gremlins in that location.

Regards,

Mike

On Aug 27, 2013, at 12:02 PM, Eric Louie <elouie at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Based on various conversation threads on Nanog I've come up with a few
> criteria for evaluating Tier 1 providers.  I'm open to add other criteria -
> what would you add to this list?  And how would I get a quantitative or
> qualitative measure of it?
> 
> 
> 
> routing stability
> 
> BGP community offerings
> 
> congestion issues
> 
> BGP Peering relationships
> 
> path diversity
> 
> IPv6 table size
> 
> 
> 
> Seems like everyone offers 5 9's service, 45 ms coast-to-coast, 24x7
> customer support, 100/1Gbps/10Gbps with various DIR/CIR and burst rates.
> I'm shopping for new service and want to do better than choosing on
> reputation.  (or, is reputation also a criteria?)
> 
> 
> 
> much appreciated,
> 
> Eric Louie
> 
> 
> 